There are two main ways to deploy software with a K1000 box. There are Managed Installations and Scripts.

The former is for recognised applications (think of popular software). The latter is for batch files and other types of scripts.

You can run an entire batch file or instead you can split it up. For example, if your batch files modifies the registry and stops and start services then you can let KACE do this for you instead of using the full batch file.

Whether you need to use some or more of your batch file, I recommend turning off the OS selection criteria and leaving the other options as open-ended as possible.

Why? Because I started off with quite stringent criteria and I scratched my head like crazy trying to figure it all out! In the end, I left most of the options as the default and suddenly it started to work!

When you troubleshoot a Sharepoint problem, it's often worth knowing what version you are running.

Sharepoint has really changed a lot over the years. The easiest way is to get to know the look and feel, especially the tabs. 2003, 2007 and 2010 have quite a different default look and feel that reflect the current flavor of the month!

Someone was trying to activate a Blackberry at work. The device was formerly owned by someone else so the SIM/telecoms account/device were already confirmed working. It was clearly a problem tied only to the user.

Now the user turned out to be new and that was a big clue.

I got this error of openmsg store failed 0x8004011d. I actually forget whether it was on the device or in the log files on the Blackberry server. I think it was the latter.

In any case, the fact this user was new was a big clue. In Exchange 2010 (and possibly other versions), you have to enable Blackberry communication on the store level. This new person was in a newly assigned store where we had forgot to make this critical configuration change.

It was a simple change in the end and after that, the activation worked!

We had a server at work that was practically locked up. It had very high CPU load.

It was a virtual server so checking vSphere showed the message "Migrating the Active State of VM".

It was doing a vmotion from one host to another.

We actually thought at first that the vmotion was inducing the high cpu load. But, of course, vmotion doesn't do this. The end user should be oblivious to it. There should be no overhead.

It turned out that the VM was being constantly vmotioned around because of it's high cpu load. In the end, we rebooted it, whatever had been the source of the problem was no more and the vmotions stopped.

Tuesday, 1 April 2014

I have a Dell Inspiron 1545. I recently bought a new hard drive and cage to go with it so I can easily swap in and out between Windows XP and Linux.

So I put my new HD in and booted the Linux Mint Maya disc. The wireless was not recognized. I went ahead and installed Linux Mint in full and then set about trying to resolve this issue.

Turns out I had to install a driver. I did have to be connected to the internet though (I used my mobile broadband but a LAN connection will also do) and then run the following commands in a terminal window:

sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-sourcesudo apt-get install firmware-b43-lpphy-installer
I did try to download all the packages so in future I would not need an internet connection but one of these scripts calls an external web site so I have no idea how to modify the installer to tell it to look locally instead. That's an exercise for the future!

Friday, 21 February 2014

At work we were trying to copy a huge file across the network from one server to another. It was around 30 or 40 gig if I remember correctly.

The file transfer kept failing part way through. The error was "not enough server storage is available to process this command".

Of course, that was completely bull, there was at least twice that amount of space free on the destination disk.

That copy was attempted using Windows Explorer. I next tried one of my favourite utilities, Microsoft's RoboCopy.

Again, the transfer conked out.

I looked around and heard that RichCopy could do the job. It's an internal Microsoft developed copying utility. It's very powerful despite using a gui. It features a really cheesy 90s-style splash screen too!

Anyway, it worked great and the copy was successful. I will definitely keep Rich Copy in my toolkit from now on.

Our site was down all over the world. But I was able to connect to the server itself. Very strange. I checked IIS and it was up and running with no issues whatsoever. Right about that time, the site availability came back. I checked the logs but there was nothing to note.

I'm still scratching my head about that one. I would think that the hosting company maybe went down but I was still able to remote in. Perhaps outgoing page loads were temporarily blocked/down? Who knows.....?

As with Citrix, you can set load balancing in RDS so that you can control roughly how many people are on each sever.

If each server had identical specifications then you would set the number on each to be identical.

If your RDS was installed long ago and all you want to do is change the relative weights, simply log into each server (using mstsc /admin), fire up Server Manager, go to RD Session Host Configuration, double click "Member of farm in RD Connection Broker" and you should see in the middle of the page the value for relative weight.

This page is handy, it explains the entire install of RDS, including the configuring of the weights.

Especially for those who organise a lot of meetings (e.g. personal assistants a.k.a. secretaries), they often receive a lot of notifications in their inbox when someone chooses to send confirmation back that they have accepted a meeting request.

You cannot unfortunately disable this in the first place but you can do something about them as soon as they hit your Inbox i.e. use a rule.

Here are some instructions on how to create a rule that will automatically delete these as soon as they hit the Inbox:

You basically need to select the condition "uses the form name form" in Step 1, then choose the "Accept Meeting Request" form from "Application Forms". The PDF explains it with screenshots much better than I can with text alone!

That's right - where I work we are still in the Dark Ages and using Exchange 2003!

I guess basic email is pretty simple when you think about it, and I have no complaints about how it does that, still strong over a decade later. Even my last client used Exchange 2003 too.

I had a call from someone who couldn't send or receive emails. Naturally, they had hit their quota again. Previously, I had told people that the quota policy was uniform and couldn't be changed.

But then I discovered that you can actually override it on an individual basis. Simply log into the Exchange server and fire up the Exchange enabled Active Directory. Find the user, right click, properties. Go to the "Exchange General" tab, click the "Storage Limits" button and change it to whatever you want.

There is, however, a 2GB hard limit in Exchange 2003. In my case, the guy was already close to this. I gave him another 100 meg but told him he had to delete some email urgently and there would be nothing I could no for him if it happened again.

If you run the install, it will dump the contents into a folder. You need only the main program .exe file, however. You can get rid of the rest and then copy this single .exe to a usb stick or direct to the server and then run it from there.

It will display the XP key, product key and more. You can modify values with it. It even works for Vista and Windows 7.

As I mentioned, I had 100% legitimate cause to do this at work. Do not use this application for anything other than 100% legal, bona-fide reasons.

We have very old Cisco Avaya phones at work. I remember around 10 years ago when these things were considered state of the art but today they are pretty basic, albeit still better than the thousands of unbranded phone systems in use in small businesses around the world.

Despite it being quite basic by today's standards, there is still a lot you can do on the configuration side. I was using the configuration software called IP Office and had changed the config for an extension. I clicked the "Save" button and it asked me how I wanted to send the configuration.

The choices were:

Merge

Immediate

When Free

Timed

Now I could not remember which was the best option. "Immediate" sounds like the obvious one but I recall my colleague telling me that one option would reboot the server!

Basically, "Merge" works with most config changes and will merge your changes with the existing configuration.

"Immediate" will guaranteed the changes immediately by rebooting the server! This is only really needed for changes for which "Merge" alone would not be enough. Luckily, most simply changes can be under "Merge".

I got a call from someone working from home. His touchpad had recently stopped working.

The keyboard and the nipple still worked. In fact, even the buttons directly adjacent to the touchpad were still working. Seeing as the buttons and the touchpad are normally a single unit, this surprised me and led me away from thinking it could be hardware related.

I was thinking about reinstalling the drivers when the user told me there was an orange light showing. So I quickly googled and discovered that this denotes that the touchpad has been disabled by the user.

Turns out that the touchpad can be enabled or disabled by double tapping in the top left hand corner. He must have accidentally done it. A couple more taps and it was enabled once more...

Sunday, 2 February 2014

I was recommended to install Webmin recently so I went ahead and did so. It's a system management tool that actually runs as an internal web site from your computer (or server if you want to think of it more appropriately that way). It's pretty good.

As it's a web tool, it means you needn't worry about differences from one system to another. You simply install it and it's dependencies and then go to https://localhost:10000 to see it. It also means that if your system has no GUI (like Ubuntu Server) then you can still install and then use it from another workstation by going to http://serveripaddress:10000.

I'm running Mint which is based on Ubuntu - the steps are the same for both. This page was especially handy for me so refer to it if you want, though the below should suffice.

Finally, finish off the installation. apt-get has some way of knowing to fix the previous installation. Type:

sudo apt-get -f install

That's it! Now you can navigate to http://localhost:10000 from the machine you're on or http://serveripaddress:10000 if you're using another machine on the network to access the web site. You'll need a password, just use your regular system password. As you'll see, it's a pretty nifty tool. I've put a screenshot below, click it to enlarge.

The reason for this was because I had set on the server-side for a mailbox to auto-forward to an external email address. Of course you can do it via the mailbox rules but these can sometimes be a bit unreliable.

So instead you can set it via one of the Exchange tabs in the Active Directory. You do first have to create an SMTP contact though, because it can only forward to another AD object.

After I did this, the above error was produced from Mimecast, our email relay service.

It is easily fixed. First, I synchronized our Active Directory with Mimecast. This usually happens twice a day, I think, so now I was going to force the change. Simply go to Services, Directory Sync, Synchronize LDAP Data.

I then went to the relay settings to configure an exception. I expected the synchronization to have done that but there was no sign of the external email address. So I just added it anyway. Here were the steps: User Directory, Profile Groups, Relay. I then added the external email address.

That's it! After that, the problematic messages disappeared and forwarding worked very swiftly as it was meant to.

The answer is "no". It will drop the connection because logging off kills all active processes.

The answer is to get the other person to use either the full TeamViewer version or a special version called "TeamViewer Host for Unattended Setup". This runs as a service and so can survive logging off and even a reboot.

One of our home workers complained that her connection to RDS is always dropping.

Incidentally, I connected to her PC via Team Viewer and also had dropped connections too.

Team Viewer and RDS connect differently. I'm quite sure RDS uses higher range ports (3389?), it is also SSL. Team Viewer I am not sure but it may be port 80.

This all leads me to believe it has something to do with her ISP. Her ISP, of course, deny this.

I decided to modify the earlier ping test batch file. For one, our RDS gateway won't return a ping which is a good thing. However, it is possible to do a tracert to it so I've created a batch file that will first create then append to a file the current date and time and then add the results of the tracert command.

The idea is that she double clicks this file whenever she gets a connection problem, in order to help create a log of the state of her connection between us and her at the time.

Here's the code. If you're not aware, just copy and paste it into a text file then rename the text file to have extension ".bat" - I wish I could show you some sample output but I'm in Linux so that bat file won't work!

------------------------------------------------

@echo off

echo --- >> c:\docume~1\j.smith\desktop\tracelogs.txt

echo --- >> c:\docume~1\j.smith\desktop\tracelogs.txt

echo %date% >> c:\docume~1\j.smith\desktop\tracelogs.txt

echo %time% >> c:\docume~1\j.smith\desktop\tracelogs.txt

echo Running connection test

echo This window will disappear when the test is complete

echo Don't do anything else in the meantime

tracert google.com >> c:\docume~1\j.smith\desktop\tracelogs.txt

echo --- >> c:\docume~1\j.smith\desktop\tracelogs.txt

echo --- >> c:\docume~1\j.smith\desktop\tracelogs.txt

------------------------------------------------

Replace "j.smith" with the user's AD username. I chose the desktop as the location because the user can create documents there, unlike the rest of the machine which is logged down (she is not a local administrator). Replace google.com with the site of your choice.

You can also loop this continuously, there's a few ways to do that, but on some older machines it may cause the fan to kick into overdrive!

Sunday, 26 January 2014

It is very useful indeed to keep a copy of all Active Directory users and associated info in a spreadsheet. One of the greatest uses is to easily know the SID of a user when you have to start editing the registry and finding their relevant sub-key.

You can get all this info using Powershell.

First you need to install the free Dell/Quest "ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory" which is a set of free Powershell commands you can use to interrogate your Active Directory and get information from it. Get the download here.

After that, simply open up Powershell, load the snap-in and then execute the command to import the data to a csv. Here's exactly how:

You may be interested to know that Outlook and other Office apps keep a store of detailed crash logs when they crash. Yes, there is always the event viewer but there is much more if you look in the right place.

For Office 2007 on Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 and above at least, you can look in the location:

c:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive

There will be an individual folder for each crash. Just looking at the date time stamps alone is useful.

Someone at work told me they couldn't print a pdf file that was showing as "secured" in the title bar. I think it may have given an error message too.

It was a little strange because she had two secured pdf files and one of them she could actually print. That was an anomaly really.

Both files came from the same person and clicking the padlock symbol within Adobe Reader showed that printing rights (as well as others) had been restricted.

While there are ways to break the security of pdf files, I was not willing to go to these lengths in a professional work environment. I told the user to speak to the originator and tell her not to secure these pdf files.

At work the other day we ran a trace on an application that produced a massive log file in no time at all. It nearly crashed the server!

Luckily, we avoided disaster but I still needed to open the file so I extract the small part of it I needed.

If you simply double click a huge text file in Windows you will wait a long time as it tries to load the entire thing into memory.

What you need is a program that will load it to some temporary disk space. You might wait a short time for it to open but you can normally start looking through it immediately, even while the rest of the file is still loading.

I looked around and found a few. One person recommended TextPad. I have not gotten around to trying it but apparently it will do the job.

The one I used first and was sufficient for my needs was Large Text File Viewer. On first running it, it looked a lot like some kind of hacking application! I was a little worried by that but it worked absolutely fine and did a great job. I was able to scroll down to the time period of the log file I needed, select the text I wanted and save to a new file.

You are probably familiar with UNC paths such as \\servername21\departmentfolder\subfolder1\subfolder2\.

They are the best way to refer to network locations although many users prefer drive letters. Personally, I think that's lazy and it really takes zero brain effort to learn how UNC paths work. I find it differs greatly depending on the culture of the office how brain dead or smart the users are!

But what if your path contains a space e.g. \\LONFDB21\Marketing\Images\Stock Image 30123.jpg ?

Then it often won't work. Windows will see a space as marking a separation and therefore the path will end at the "k" in "Stock". So if you need to send a UNC path to someone, you need to do one of the following:

double quotes around the UNC path

"<" and ">" around the UNC path

replace spaces with %20 (this seems to work better in browsers, I've found it unreliable elsewhere).

So above, I could use, for example:

<\\LONFDB21\Marketing\Images\Stock Image 30123.jpg>

or

"\\LONFDB21\Marketing\Images\Stock Image 30123.jpg"

You'll find that MS Office programs will also hyperlink correctly if you do it in this manner.

We're currently on Exchange 2003 which has minimal functionality, certainly no fancy reports or anything! In fact, I'm not sure later versions do either.

I looked around and there are a couple of ways.

The best, report-wise, is to use a program from Quest (now owned by Dell) called Quest Security Explorer. This allows for all manner of fancy reports about various security/permissions parameters of your infrastructure. It's no free but you can get an evaluation license which may be enough for your needs.

The downside is that you need to install on your local workstation some kind of Exchange extensions, in order for the program to communicate properly with your Exchange Server. I tried to fish around for our disc but eventually gave up.

There is also a tool called ADModify which I just could not get to work in our environment. Here is a tutorial if you are interested.

I recently rebuilt the XP machine of someone at work. Naturally, he complained that his Outlook configuration had been restored to it's original state.

This is often a gripe with people at work when they lose configuration settings. These settings should be done by the user. But all too often they don't bother to learn it themselves or they do but still forget. All too often they can't be bothered to really figure it out. This is the point at which IT staff become nothing more than servants.

Anyway, he was used to seeing his contacts in a public folder in an arrangement of groups.

I could not work out how he managed it but eventually realized that this can only be done with the use of categories. You can see from the below screenshots exactly how to do this:

Saturday, 25 January 2014

I wrote earlier that I was quite disappointed at how unreliable file copying has been in my quite limited recent experience of Linux. I simply found that the copies were not the same as the originals when checking using Linux's built-in checksum calculator Terminal command: md5sum.

I was on the lookout for a file manager/copier that would do a better job.

Many people recommended rsync -c but I discovered that it is a common misconception that it performs a verification after the copy has been done. This is simply not true.

In fact, I looked long and hard and several people had the same need as me but I could only find one solution:

I found a program that performs copying and checksum verification called Safe File Manager. The only problem is: I'm scared to run it!

The site does not look very professional and the owner of the site seems to be anonymous. In days gone by I would happily use such a program but these days I run a business and I am extremely careful about installing untrusted software that could potentially capture my passwords and ultimately compromise my livelihood. It's a great shame as this program really looks like it would fit the bill.

As an aside, I also discovered that the terminal command sync will force writes to a device. I think this will be handy as I earlier got the distinct impression that writing to USB devices seems to lag and I wonder if some of the md5 mismatches were because the data had not yet been fully copied yet. This command might help me.

Back in the days of DOS I used to make batch files all the time, in fact I still do in Windows even today.

I wanted to know how to do this in Linux. Right now I have to launch KeePass by typing each time:

mono /home/me/KeePass/KeePass.exe

It's not too much of a pain but I want to save any time where I can. The more convenient it is to reach my tools, the more and better I'll use them.

So I've read up and things work a little different in Linux.

I already knew I needed to make a "shell script". I've seen these marked with ".sh" and even tried to make my own earlier but it didn't work. Unlike DOS/Windows, the extension does not change the way the file is treated. In fact ".sh" is just used as a nice way of telling the user what kind of file it is. I'll tell you how to tell the OS what to do in a minute.

First I start by opening gedit, the text editor.

Then I type the following:

#! /bin/bashmono /home/me/KeePass/KeePass.exe

Then save it with whatever name I want. Finally, I right-click it, Properties, Permissions tab then check "Allow this file to run as a program". That tells the OS what to do with it. There is a terminal method to do this called "chmod" but I need to read up on it again on exactly how it works.

That's it, now this file will execute as if I were typing that second line directly in a Terminal window.

Friday, 24 January 2014

Today downloaded the ISO for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I have been meaning to install this so I can get to grips with what is the leading enterprise Linux distribution (the other one is SUSE Linux Enterprise by Novell).

It was very confusing. Apparently it is a 30 day trial. And yet I read elsewhere that it is nothing like traditional Microsoft/other corporate licensing in that actually anything derived from Linux, being GNU, must therefore be free to all. So apparently Red Hat Linux is actually free, it's just that you pay to get the updates. Given that many Linux distros are so stable they don't even need updating necessarily, it's almost effectively free if you look at it that way.

You must first register at Red Hat's web site (click here to register, link opens in a new window). After that, you get the ability to download ISOs. I registered as a personal account.

I downloaded the RHEL server (as opposed to desktop), 32-bit ISO of version 6 (I think it is actually 6.5 but I'm unsure till I install it). It took me a while to find this version, there are many other strange and different versions (including betas, minimal boot discs and add-ons) that I just wasn't interested in!

I intend to get my Red Hat Linux certification. Hopefully all I need to do to prepare is get a good book and practise with this installation! As you can see, there is also a workstation version but it's much more important to get experience of the server platform.

It's one of these unbranded Chinese models. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a reputable brand making these, not that I've seen anyway. Even in Windows XP it can be a little troublesome and require replugging or power cycling.

But for Linux, I can read from it fine but I cannot write to it at all.

I heard it could be due to an old ntfs driver so I searched the Software Repository for "ntfs-3g" but saw it was already installed and presumably being used.

By the way, I've had no such issues with USB memory sticks.

I also tried right-clicking and "Open Folder as root" but this didn't work either. I just couldn't write to the drive. Sometimes I'd get "input/output" errors.

I guess this device is just incompatible with Linux. That's no big deal really. I have other, proper external hard drives.

I've got to admit though, I'm a little worried about the way Linux handles external devices, especially those of FAT32/NTFS format. In doing my research, I've read some horror stories about it scrambling existing data!

In the end, I inserted a USB stick with data on it that I didn't care about and copied the files. I had a chance to use the terminal command "cp" to copy across. I then ran md5sum to check that the files had been copied perfectly.

In fact they weren't! One of them, a big one around 1 gig, was not copied and I got different MD5 checksums! I copied it again using the GUI and had the same problem! I tried replugging the USB stick and I got read only errors again! Finally I replugged it once more and could write to it again, copied with the gui once more and the checksums failed. I tried again with the cp command and FINALLY the MD5 checksums matched!

Why these MD5s did not match, I do not know. I have heard that Linux likes to use write caching a lot. So you think the file has been copied but it's still really just catching up...who knows?

Perhaps there are better ways to do all this. I am treading on new ground, after all. Best I don't become TOO reliant on Linux just yet...! Oh, I miss Windows XP already! :D

At work, one of the PAs asked me why calendar entries would often be duplicated. We run Exchange 2003 with Outlook 2007 clients.

Now it was some time ago so I forget the exact reason why but it is basically a bug and there are two ways to stop it.

The first is to fix the account. The problem occurs because there is a bug in the account. To fix the bug, you must move the mailbox from the existing mail store to another mail store and then move it back again.

The second is to simply upgrade Exchange. This bug is found in version 2003. When you move to Exchange 2007 or later, this problem will disappear.

In the end, we chose to do nothing because an upgrade of Exchange is due over the next few months anyway. I did not want to move mailbox from one store and back again. I saw it as too big a risk for something that is just an annoyance and for which a fix is not business critical but simply "nice to have".

Some of you may think a mailbox move to be trivial but I've learned that the most trivial things can easily raise new, more serious implications. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

If you get an email bounce back with the error "failure notice does not like recipient" then it's an easy one.

It means that the email server of the company of the person you are trying to reach has rejected your email based simply on your sending email address (more correctly, the IP address).

Most big companies use some kind of reputation checking service. For example, Mimecast is one of the huge ones (in fact, Mimecast is a much bigger overall email solution). There are others too and just like credit checking companies, there are a handful of big global hitters when it comes to reputation checking.

If you get this message then it is usually a problem with your sending IP address. There may even be a further message such as "550 Bad CT IP Reputation". In this case, the "CT" actually refers to the blacklisting company, CommTouch.

You need to visit the big reputation keepers, check your reputation and, where bad, raise a request to be white-listed.

Some of the major ones are Commtouch, Mimecast, Spamhaus, AOL and others. You can find larger lists of them online. Here's one such blog post containing the big hitters. If your company cannot send email to external clients then you need to go to all the reputation checkers and tell them to whitelist your IP address.

We had this problem ourselves when we changed our company internet connection. The new IP we received just happened to be on a blacklist!

Every Sunday I perform by weekly backups. It's a good habit I've gotten into recently. I back up a Truecrypt container of my personal data (excluding media, which is just too big).

Ordinarily I would do this from my XP machine but I stopped using XP last week. So this week marks the first week I need to do that from my new Linux box!

I guess the process will be much the same. I'm still not fully "migrated" to Linux. I have, on purpose, not saved too much data to this installation. I still feel like XP is my "base".

I know this cannot change overnight. It's likely that I will go some time, maybe 6 months, before I fully do. In fact, I am starting to think that I will never fully move away from Windows and, anyway, why should I? I think it's a state of perfection many are trying to reach for no really good reason other than a sense of accomplishment.

Let's face it: a great many programs (including open source) are made only for Windows. And because I use my brain and actually think before I click, I don't ever get viruses on Windows anyway so there's no reason there for me to abandon it.

My ideal situation would be to invest in another machine or two in the near future so I can have separate Windows and Linux machines (without having to swap hard drives out) as well as a spare for trying out new distros.

Linux is great, I love it. But there's no such thing as the perfect OS. And there's no reason not to enjoy multiple operating systems either.

Saturday, 18 January 2014

I had a machine to rebuild at work. I put the OS on and started to install applications again. I tried to install MS Office 2007 (yes, we are behind the times!) from a network location but the install just gave up after barely a minute. Seems the install files were corrupt or something.

So I decided to download Office 2007 again, from the official Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center. This is a site you can log into to get your product keys and downloadable software for which you are licensed.

Unfortunately, only an ISO was available. I like ISOs, they are nice and self-contained but I did not want to burn a disc and nor did I want to install iso mounting software on the user's PC. So I needed to install the iso mounting software on my own PC, mount the ISO and copy the mounted files into the network location from where I could try installing again.

I installed Daemon Tools, my usual favorite, and when it finished it wanted me to reboot the PC! I know for most of you that is not a problem but the computer I've inherited at work takes an age to boot up, plus I had a lot of apps opened.

Luckily, I found a freeware program online that could not only mount ISOs but would do it without requiring a reboot: MagicISO. It was just what I needed and worked perfectly!

The other day I installed Wine using the software repository. Until now, I had assumed that it would report the latest (at least stable) versions. This is not the case! It seems the Software Repository itself does not update, not by default anyway.

So, I decided to install version 1.6 which is also the latest stable version. But how to upgrade? There was no option in Software Repository.

Now I understand already that the terminal command "apt-get" is some kind of way to install programs and all their dependencies. I think it works by keeping a local copy of approved repositories that you can add to (taking care, of course) and then poll for various applications and their dependencies to be downloaded.

But all I could find was info on installing apps and nothing on upgrading them. In the end, I decided to uninstall Wine 1.4 using the Software Repository and then re-install it (v1.6) using the terminal window. I hoped that uninstalling it wouldn't unwind a ton of dependencies that would then break when trying to reinstall. A lot more complicated than your typical Windows uninstall and reinstall methinks, and a lot more to potentially go wrong.

So after uninstalling, I opened a terminal window and type in the following commands (thanks to this site):

It went well. In fact, I had noticed after uninstalling that the Wine menus were still there. Strange, I thought. It made sense after running the commands above: the procedure actually uninstalled Wine 1.4. Pretty smart, eh? I'm not sure why it never really got uninstalled but at least the commands I used took care of that. I've attached the output below if you want to read it (my username is "user").

After that, I re-ran Thunderbird Portable and it worked pretty well. Only downside was it can't handle an IMAP connection - it crashed again - but it can handle POP3 fine. I actually just put a dummy account there as my main use for it is for locally stored mail I've moved from another installation of this application. I don't intend to use it to send and receive new email.

Here's the terminal window output:

user@computer ~/Desktop $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

[sudo] password for user:

You are about to add the following PPA to your system:

Welcome to the Wine Team PPA. Here you can get the latest available Wine betas for every supported version of Ubuntu. This PPA is managed by Scott Ritchie and Maarten Lankhorst.